The Anthrax Protocol

by James Thompson

  After the massive load of equipment was offloaded, the chopper set down briefly and another orange-suited figure emerged, walking clumsily in the suit as if he wasn’t used to wearing one.

  Lauren heard the name “Dr. Matos” mentioned over her helmet radio as the new arrival was greeted by the other scientists. Dr. Matos had apparently kept his word to join them here at the site.

  Lauren noticed another member of the team wearing an orange suit hang back a moment, connecting some sort of instrument to Joel’s radio. No one else appeared to be aware of this team member’s absence near the portable laboratory, too busy themselves to pay attention to what was going on. Lauren couldn’t see who it was and it seemed odd at the time, but then what did she know about Wildfire Team procedures?

  Chapter 8

  Sweat beaded on his forehead and dripped into the young Indio’s eyes as he trudged through jungle humidity darkening rapidly as dusk approached. Even though centuries of evolution had caused his people’s perspiration to be unappetizing to the horde of mosquitos and other biting insects of the wilderness, they continued to swarm around his head, filling his eyes and nose and making it difficult to breathe without inhaling the noxious creatures.

  Their buzzing irritated and distracted him as he listened for the grunt of a night-feeding jaguar or the squeal of a boar protecting its young, either of which could be fatal if he missed their warning signs. He’d been careless once today already, letting the man in the orange clothes spot him as he watched them work.

  He froze when he heard the sound of a jeep engine a few hundred yards ahead. The sound suddenly ceased, and he decided to investigate. Stepping nimbly through dense undergrowth without making a sound, he soon parted the leaves of a jacaranda tree and peered into a small clearing next to the narrow stone and gravel road that meandered through the forest.

  He saw a tall, thin Anglo gathering wood in the darkening light, preparing a campfire as he laid out a sleeping bag and cooking utensils. In a few moments, the smell of coffee and soup boiling made the boy’s mouth water and his stomach growl. He had eaten nothing other than bananas and berries for two days and was weak with hunger. The sudden sickness and deaths of the Anglos at the camp had made him afraid to eat any more of their food, though they’d been generous with it before the curse came and killed them all.

  The tall white man hummed to himself as he prepared his supper, causing the Indio to take a chance that the man would be good natured enough to share his food. After all, he knew he could disappear in the jungle in seconds if necessary. No white man could slip through the undergrowth as nimbly and fast as he could, having done it ever since he could walk.

  Taking a deep breath, the boy cried softly, “Hola, señor,” and stepped from his hiding place into the clearing, his hands held out from his body in a nonthreatening manner, his legs quivering, ready to take flight should the man prove unfriendly.

  The Anglo was startled, dropping his coffee cup and cursing in surprise. “Goddamn!”

  When he saw the small teenage boy, he grinned sheepishly and shook his head. “Shit, boy,” he said, bending to pick up his coffee cup. “You scared me half to death sneaking up on me like that.”

  It was a sign of how surprised he was that he instinctively spoke in English rather than Spanish.

  The boy answered in broken English he had learned from priests who visited his village, “I am most sorry, señor.” He pointed at the pot bubbling over the fire. “Hungry.”

  The man waved an arm in a carefree gesture. “Come on in and join me. There’s plenty for both of us. My name’s Malcolm Fitzhugh. What’s yours?”

  “I am called Guatemotzi,” the boy replied as he took a bowl from the ground next to the fire and ladled rich-smelling soup into it. His mouth watered and his stomach growled again, causing him to blush with embarrassment.

  The man, playing the generous host, pretended not to notice. He was used to the extreme poverty and hunger that most of the Indians in this part of Mexico lived with daily.

  There was little talk for a while as the two squatted in the firelight and ate, Fitzhugh showing Guatemotzi how to dip chunks of bread into the meaty liquid to sop up every last drop of the tasty brew.

  When they were finished, Fitzhugh poured coffee for both of them into tin cups, adding large spoonfuls of sugar and a dollop of condensed milk from a can into the thick liquid. He leaned back against a log, lit a cigarette, and peered at Guatemotzi over the rim of his cup as he drank.

  “What are you doing wandering out here all alone in the jungle at night, boy? Is your village nearby?”

  Guatemotzi shook his head, blowing on the hot liquid to cool it. “No. Is many kilometers south. I work at Americano camp, helping dig until they got sick.”

  Fitzhugh raised his eyebrows, smoke trailing from his nostrils. “The archaeological site of the American university professors? That’s where I was heading.”

  Guatemotzi shook his head vigorously. “No, señor, you must not go there. All Americanos very sick, and most now dead. It is bad place—is cursed.”

  Fitzhugh smiled uncertainly, firelight reflecting off his teeth in the moonlit darkness. “Are you sure they’re dead, not just suffering from dysentery? Those Americans never learn not to drink the local water.”

  He didn’t really believe the boy, for he’d been there only last week making acquaintances with workers who would be willing to sell him artifacts from the dig site they’d stolen. They couldn’t all have died in such a short amount of time—the boy must be mistaken.

  Guatemotzi lowered his eyes. He knew it was much worse than simple diarrhea. It was the curse of the God Montezuma that had killed the Americanos, but this Anglo would never understand that. Still, he had to try. “No, señor, you must not! I tell you they all dead!”

  Fitzhugh continued to stare at the boy appraisingly, lighting another cigarette off the butt of his first. “I’ve got to go there, boy, it’s my job. I buy the things the scientists dig up and sell them in the city. You understand?”

  Guatemotzi nodded, becoming very excited. Perhaps this Anglo would give him money for what he had found in the emperor’s tomb after the Americanos got sick.

  He reached into the deerskin pouch slung over his shoulder, the one in which he carried his poison arrows for killing game. He pulled out a leather collar with green and red stones and hammered silver embedded in it.

  Fitzhugh’s eyes bugged and his heart hammered and his mouth became dry as the boy handed him the collar.

  “Like this, señor?”

  Fitzhugh took the artifact in trembling hands, trying to calculate in his mind what it would be worth in Mexico City or Houston. “Where did you get this?” he asked, knowing it could only have come from the tomb itself.

  “From cave where Emperor Montezuma lay,” Guatemotzi answered. “When Americanos got too sick to pay me, I took this for work I did. It was around neck of small monkey near emperor’s body.”

  Fitzhugh’s eyes narrowed as he stared at the way firelight sparkled in the emeralds and rubies and reflected off the silver strands woven around the deerskin strap. He’d read stories of how Emperor Montezuma kept small jungle animals as pets, so he knew the boy was telling the truth. That this collar had been worn by one of Montezuma’s pets made it almost priceless in value.

  He pulled a wad of pesos from his pocket and handed them to Guatemotzi. “I’ll give you twenty thousand pesos for it. Is that enough?”

  Guatemotzi was astounded. That was more money than he had ever seen. His would be the richest family in the village.

  “Si, señor!” he said, placing the bills in his deerskin pouch.

  Fitzhugh grinned and scrambled to his feet. He ran to his jeep and placed the collar in his duffle bag before the boy could change his mind. He took a bag of army rations and handed them to the young Indian. “Here is some food for you. I won’t be needing it anymore. I’m leaving immediately for Mexico City.”

  Without another word or a look back,
Fitzhugh jumped into his jeep, started the engine, and roared off following his headlights down the dirt road, visions of untold riches flitting through his mind.

  As he drove through the darkening evening, Fitzhugh pulled the collar from his bag and held it before his eyes, grinning and watching the moonlight play off the jewels’ facets.

  With a gleeful laugh, he brought the collar to his lips and kissed it. He had no idea it was a kiss of death, or that he would be dead within a week.

  * * *

  Thousands of microscopic spores drifted off the deerskin collar where they had lain for four hundred years. They swirled in the moonlight and wind and were inhaled by Fitzhugh as he kissed the collar. They traveled in through his nasal passages and throat and lodged in the mucosa of his trachea and lungs.

  The spores, tiny polysaccharide balls, were formed by the plague organisms when they were unable to find suitable hosts in which to multiply. Inhabiting the spores like tiny astronauts in individual spaceships, they were able to hibernate and survive almost indefinitely without food, water, or air, lying in suspended animation awaiting only moisture to reawaken them like some malevolent Rip Van Winkles.

  As the spores were moistened by Fitzhugh’s mucosa, they split open and poured hundreds of thousands of plague organisms into his bloodstream. There they immediately began to split and multiply again and again, overwhelming the white blood cells his body sent in defense. Soon these organisms would begin to secrete toxins, which would destroy the parts of his blood that allowed it to coagulate, eventually causing massive hemorrhaging from every orifice.

  The process could not be stopped now short of death.

  Chapter 9

  Lauren felt weak, as if her blood sugar had suddenly dropped. She had been gazing at familiar faces ravaged by decomposition and predators without a break almost since they arrived—identifying corpses while the doctors were setting up equipment, and worst of all, cutting, probing, and otherwise desecrating the bodies of her friends and colleagues.

  She was emotionally wrung out, physically exhausted, and feared she was also becoming dehydrated. It was impossible to eat or drink while enclosed in a Racal and she had sweltered inside the space suit all afternoon, sweat running down her face, stinging her eyes, and irritating her skin. She lost count of how many times she swiped at her faceplate with a gloved hand, trying in vain to wipe salty perspiration away.

  At least she was no longer crying—both her tear ducts and her grief had suffered overload from the enormity of the tragedy she found in Tlateloco. She felt emotionally numb and sat there on a box staring off into space trying to distance herself from all that was going on around her as if that might assuage her grief at all she had seen. She felt if she could only isolate her feelings of loss and grief and somehow put them outside herself she might just survive this hellish mission.

  She was startled when Mason put a hand on her shoulder. The Racal hood prohibits peripheral vision and she hadn’t seen him approaching as she sat beside an escoba palm tree in the coming darkness, apart from the others and their grisly experiments on the dead, illuminated by portable halogen lamps.

  “Dr. Sullivan, we’ve finally managed to get the mobile lab set up. If you’re ready, I’ll walk you and Dr. Matos through the procedure to enter and get out of your suits.”

  “Is it air-conditioned?” she asked hopefully, watching Eduardo in his orange protective gear standing at the base of the Aztec temple with a flashlight, probing its stones with the beam.

  Mason nodded to her inside his hood, and in dim light from the generator lamps she noticed a smile and how it changed his appearance. His temples crinkled when he grinned, softening his ice-blue eyes, making him look like a small boy playing Starship Trooper in his orange space suit.

  He was handsome, in a bookish way, she thought. She sighed and struggled to her feet, crediting her feelings to some strange hormone flux, some inner chemical assault brought on by physical stress and exhaustion, not to mention dehydration and extreme hunger.

  He led her toward the silver laboratory brought in by the helicopter, sitting at the edge of the clearing a short distance from the tents and cots that contained the bodies. “The procedure is really quite simple,” he said casually, “although it can be a bit frightening and . . . embarrassing the first time you experience it.”

  She tripped over uneven terrain once in the half dark and said, “Just so it’s air-conditioned.” And then she thought, what does he mean by embarrassing?

  “We’ll enter through a door at this end of the lab. The first chamber is quite small, only room for two of us at a time. Once inside, stand still with your arms outspread. I’ll pull a chain and we’ll be showered with three different solutions—phenolic acid, bleach, and water. That should disinfect us and kill any germs clinging to the outside of our suits.

  “Once the shower stops, we’ll enter a larger inner chamber where we’ll help each other out of our Racals, which we’ll hang up on special hooks on the wall to your left.”

  “That sounds simple enough.” She said it without really thinking about the procedure he described.

  Mason cleared his throat, and his voice changed pitch slightly. She glanced at him and could see his cheeks flaming red.

  “Then we have to remove all our clothes and shower again in a mild chlorine solution and then we will change into scrub suits. The clothing we wore under the Racals will be put into sealed plastic bags to be burned later in case of inadvertent contamination.”

  She hesitated. “You mean ALL of our clothes?”

  “Yes. Of course,” he added quickly, “I’ll turn my back and face the other way.”

  Lauren heard someone chuckle over her headset and she knew some of the other doctors were listening to their conversation with more than clinical interest.

  Mason said, “I apologize for this, but the Cytotec BL Four isn’t engineered for privacy, only for safety from infection.”

  He addressed Dr. Johnson quickly, as though wishing to change subjects. “Lionel, bring Dr. Matos to the lab and take him through the procedure step-by-step.”

  Lauren smiled to herself, liking Dr. Williams for having the grace to be apologizing for their situation, to be worried about her dignity even in the face of what was going on around them. In truth, she wasn’t too concerned. She was, after all, an adult and he was a doctor. But then why, she wondered, was her pulse suddenly beating faster at the prospect of disrobing in a small room with him?

  “I’ll bring Dr. Matos,” a distant voice replied. “I suppose if you’re the boss, you get the best assignments.”

  Another soft chuckle came from a different member of the group.

  The disinfecting shower was a little scary at first, with a spray of chemicals splattering against her face mask. Lauren had fewer concerns about disrobing in front of Mason with both their backs turned. However, when they stepped into a shower that was barely big enough for both of them, all thoughts of modesty were banished. For his part, he tried his best to keep his eyes focused on the wall of the shower and not her naked body.

  Once the shower stopped, she put on a pair of green scrub pants and a sleeveless top.

  “Ready?” he asked, still with his back turned.

  “My word, Doctor, but you’ve got a cute butt,” she said mischievously.

  “What?” he exclaimed, pulling a towel tight around his waist.

  She laughed, trying to relieve the pressure of what she’d been through all day. “Just kidding, Dr. Williams, just kidding. I kept my gaze averted like a good little girl.”

  He turned and saw that she was already dressed in her scrubs. Whirling a finger in a circle, he smiled and said, “Then please turn back around while I dress. I am very shy, you know.”

  She grinned and dutifully turned her back. “But, I’ll bet it is cute, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t know, not being able to see myself from behind,” he answered with a chuckle.

  Once dressed, he opened a tightly seal
ed door leading into a room where everything seemed miniaturized: a small table and chairs, a sink, and a refrigerator like the ones found in travel trailers.

  She was immediately aware of the wash of cold air against her skin and heard the hum of air-conditioning coming from the roof.

  “This is better,” Lauren sighed, sinking into a tiny plastic chair at the table, resting her chin in her palms as she watched Mason open the refrigerator. Even as tired as she was she found herself noticing his good looks again, and the ease with which he seemed to accomplish any task. He had, she realized, economy of movement. Everything he did was accomplished without any wasted motion.

  Mason prepared a large pot of coffee, “a doctor’s lifeblood” he called it, and placed a tall bottle of Gatorade on the table. “Try to drink some of this,” he said, offering her a paper cup. “The heat and sweating inside a Racal causes you to lose a lot of sodium and potassium. This electrolyte solution will replace it and hopefully keep you from having muscle spasms and cramps later.”

  “I won’t need much encouragement to drink the whole thing,” she said, filling the cup to the brim and taking a swig. “By the way, Dr. Williams, what does the name Cytotec BL Four mean?”

  “First,” he said, turning to look at her over his shoulder as he fussed with the coffee machine, “I think it should be Mason and Lauren from now on. We don’t stand much on formality here in the lab,” he added in a matter-of-fact way.

  “The quarters are too small and, as you’ve already seen, personal privacy is almost nonexistent.”

  Lauren smiled weakly and nodded her agreement. “It’s Mason and Lauren, then,” she said, gulping more fluid, aware of a slight tremor in her hands, probably from exhaustion and the dehydration he mentioned earlier and not from any excitement to be in such close quarters with a very attractive man.

  “As for the name, it comes from the term Cytology Technologies, the company that manufactures the lab and equipment we use to do studies on tissue and blood samples,” he continued, interrupting her reverie. “The BL Four stands for Biohazard Level Four, the highest level, meant for study of the most infectious, dangerous organisms in the world.”